Maybe I shouldn't say this

Thursday, February 7, 2013

In a cruel but fitting note, Valentine's Day this year is two months to the day that a mad man took advantage of our lax gun laws to rob his mother of a cache of weapons and then use a military grade rifle to blow body parts off of first-graders.

In those two months, we've done nothing. From all signs, nothing will be done. Nothing to tighten gun laws. Nothing to require more stringent background checks. Nothing to ban civilians, who have no need for assault rifles, from possessing assault rifles and exploding rounds of ammunition.

Nothing to even delay the next nutjob with a need for attention and an axe to grind from walking into your child's elementary school and shooting your precious little angel, point blank, between the eyes, simply because they were there and because they could.

Some will say this is because we're a gun nation, and guns are ingrained in our culture. Others will say that the Second Amendment to the Constitution prevents us from doing much more than waiting for the next mass killing, the next mass murder, the next school shooting, the next funeral procession for babies needlessly taken.

Never mind that we were once a slave nation with a slave culture. Never mind that the Constitution can be amended. Never mind that the Second Amendment speaks of a citizenry militia, and not a personal stockpile of machine guns.

Never mind that these are excuses for doing nothing -- an inexcusable form of social mental masturbation at a time when we need to get in there and fix this.

Are we even a nation of human beings anymore? Twenty children are so violently murdered that the police advise their parents to identify the bodies by photograph, because most of the six-year-olds are missing pieces of their body and are so full of bullet holes and exploded, burnt skin marks that seeing the actual corpse would be psychologically scarring.

To this day, none of us have seen the actual carnage, because if you had seen the carnage, you'd march into Congress and demand those sons of bitches do something to ban the weapons and ammunition that allows adults to do such things to children.

So I ask again: Are we even a nation of human beings anymore? Because what *I* saw after the shootings was half the nation stand up, like a bunch of shit-flinging chimps, and start screeching and hooting and hollering about THEIR rights to own machine guns and how no one and nothing was going to stop them from doing as they please.

Really? That's your response to the murder of children. No, murder is not the right word. Murder is much more restrained than this. I remind you -- these children were memorialized with closed coffins because they were missing pieces of their bodies. The one boy whose parents insisted on an open casket still had a veil over his face because he was missing his jaw. Yes, his jaw. And also his left hand, which was shot clean off. These are just the wounds we can even talk about.

The only acceptable response to this is "Oh my fucking god, we have got to eliminate the access to weapons that can easily sever the jaws and hands of children."

And yet, that is not the response we saw from America -- especially and shamefully from the right wing half of America. These stupid soulless imbeciles, these aforementioned shit-flinging chimps of the world, had only one response: You can have my assault rifle cache when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

The better among us are starting to think that maybe this is a fair deal, though we are unsure how to kill them all at once. Maybe if we added a little more poison to each filet o'fish they'd just do the dirty work for us. Science has already proven that watching Fox News makes you less knowledgeable; maybe we can add something to their broadcasts that stimulates deadly heart attacks or some kind of extremely painful soul cancer.

I don't know about you, but I would trade sane gun laws and unbulleted children for the lives of every asinine uzi-defending adult in the country, if that's what it took.

Banning anything more powerful than a handgun or a deer-hunting rifle may not solve every single gun-related problem. It won't bring back Noah Posner or any of the twenty children whose bits and pieces were spread across their elementary school not 60 days ago. It won't bring back the millions of people killed by guns in this country in the last 50 years. (At last count, just since Robert Kennedy got shot in 1968, more Americans have died to gun violence in this country than fell in battle in all our wars across all our years, from the Revolution right up to Iraq. How are we as a nation not ashamed of this?)

But it is a start. It is something. Maybe by next Valentine's Day, the only jaws dropping to the floor will be those of metaphorical women receiving jewelry and not the flesh and bony ones searing off of schoolchildren.